Category Archives: 12043

Microsoft have released the Lync 2013 client for Windows Phone 8, and it looks great – many more features than the 2010 version, including voice and video calling. However, when I try to login to my account on Office 365 it tells me that “You can’t sign in with this version of Lync. Please install Lync 2010.”

That’s unfortunate and somewhat unexpected, partly because I’m happily using the Lync 2013 desktop client on my Windows 8 desktop, but more so because the app description in the Windows Phone Store gives no real indication that it wouldn’t work. What it does say, in all caps, is this:

IMPORTANT: THIS SOFTWARE REQUIRES CONNECTIVITY TO VALIDLY LICENSED COPIES OF MICROSOFT LYNC SERVER OR OFFICE 365 / LYNC ONLINE AND WILL NOT WORK WITHOUT IT. UPDATES TO MICROSOFT LYNC SERVER MAY BE REQUIRED FOR PROPER PERFORMANCE. SOME FUNCTIONALITY MAY NOT BE AVAILABLE IN ALL COUNTRIES. IF YOU ARE UNSURE ABOUT YOUR COMPANY’S LICENSE TO AND/OR DEPLOYMENT OF LYNC, PLEASE CONTACT YOUR IT DEPARTMENT.

That’s the only information about requirements for using the app, and you’ll notice that it explicitly says that you can use it with Office 365. It’s not a case of “some functionality may not be available in all countries” – this client uses something called UCX which isn’t supported by Lync 2010 servers, so evidentially we’ll have to wait for Microsoft to upgrade our O365 tennancy. I’d be fine with that if the above important information didn’t say “UPDATES TO MICROSOFT LYNC SERVER MAY BE REQUIRED FOR PROPER PERFORMANCE.” I’d say that “proper performance” implies that some features may not work optimally, not that you won’t be able to get so far as signing in!

I’m sure that the people who have Lync 2013 and Windows Phone 8 devices are going to be very happy with this app, and I expect that I may be happy with it in the future* but this is just another example of Microsoft giving mixed/misleading messages around Windows Phone 8 and it isn’t good enough! (For the other prime example that annoys me even more, I refer you to the podcast user experience outside the USA. Going into the Podcasts section of the Music + Videos hub tells you that “It’s lonely in here. Go to the Store to add some podcasts”, but there aren’t any unless you’re in the USA. This is something that’s built in to the core OS and only works in one country of all the teritories where Windows Phones are sold. Shocking.)

On a positive note, as one of my colleagues pointed out, at least the error message in this case is vaguely helpful and doesn’t just give you some obscure error code.

Last week I upgraded from a Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7.5 to the HTC Windows Phone 8X running Windows Phone 8. I’m not going to write a full review of the hardware or the OS, but I am going to brain-dump some initial thoughts on them both.

The Pros:

Great screen – increased resolution really helps.

Very responsive. Much better performance than Windows Phone 7. Could be the hardware or the OS, probably both.

Changes to the home screen are good – I’m very happy with the increased data density.

The phone looks and feels much slimmer than it actually is. It’s also light enough that it practically disappears in a jean pocket.

Screenshots! This is a big deal for those of us who want to document and write about Windows Phone.

You can move content between WP8 and a Windows RT tablet. That might not help many people, but you can’t transfer content directly to an iPhone from an iPad.

Kid’s Corner works very well (although I did experience a bug which made it still ask for my PIN to unlock the phone the first time I set it up).

The Cons are mostly to do with Windows Phone 8, rather than the 8X hardware, so I’ll get my one gripe with that out of the way first:

The case isn’t tight enough around the screen – there’s a thin gap at the top of the screen big enough to get dust and lint trapped. That’s going to constantly annoy me (although not a lot – it’s very much a 1st world problem).

Podcast support is a disaster. It might be fine in the USA, but given that there aren’t regional licensing issues with podcasts, it’s totally unacceptable to leave it so completely broken for everyone else!

Not all Windows Phone 7 apps are compatible (TuneIn Radio, for example). I don’t think that has been made clear.

Auto-updating of the lockscreen with Bing images doesn’t seem to be working for me (it does work with the HTC option of displaying the weather).

I’d like even more live tile sizes (2×1, for example).

Data Sense was much-touted, but isn’t there yet, and maybe it never will be on your carrier.

So basically the one thing that annoys me the most about Windows Phone 8 is the totally abysmal podcast support. It wasn’t wonderful in Windows Phone 7 outside the USA, where you had to sync via Zune before you could subscribe to over-the-air updates on the device, and you could only browse the podcast directory in Zune if you used a registry hack. That said, even if the only thing we could do was enter the address of an RSS feed, that would be better than what we have today in WP8.

I’m sure there are lots of people who will buy one of these phones and never care about podcasts, but for me they’re really important – they’re how I stay current with tech and where I get new music. I usually listen to upwards for four a week while I’m commuting.

On Windows Phone 8, if you open up “music + videos” and then “podcasts”, you get a helpful message suggesting that you add some from the Store, except that there aren’t any podcasts in my Store!

Now, I fully understand why there are regional differences in marketplaces for music, video, books, even some apps. There are content distribution agreements that need to be signed with different regional organisations. That’s fine. It absolutely doesn’t apply to podcasts!

The podcast directory that Microsoft maintains for its US customers is just as valid for customers in the UK, India, Guatemala and everywhere else. I’m sure they’d say that they want to localise the experience so that it highlights podcasts in the right language or of greater local interest (football vs football, etc). Nobody wants to wait for that, especially since they could’ve done it in the last two years if they were going to. If the option is the US podcast store or nothing, then guess what – the most popular podcasts in the world are from the US and are consumed worldwide, so we’d rather have the ability to subscribe to them.

Maybe it’s just that on-demand digital media isn’t the future. Oh… hang on a minute…!

If you use Microsoft Office and you aren’t a OneNote user, you need to go right now and see how excellent it is, then come back.

Are you back? Good.

Right, now that you’ve seen how good it can be on the desktop, just think how good it would be if you could have your OneNote notebooks with you anywhere, synced via the cloud to your smartphone or tablet, and even accessible and editable in a web browser…

Well if you make sure that you actually store your OneNote notebooks on a free SkyDrive account then you could already sync them between OneNote on multiple desktops, your Windows Phone, iPhone or iPad, and even share them with friends/family/colleages as appropriate.

The feature list looks like it features pretty much everything that you’d need for note-taking on the move. If you’re rocking an Android device, go get it now (yes, even if you’re an Evernote user – Evernote is great, but you should definitely compare and contrast OneNote – to my mind it’s a nicer way to work).

* Blackberry users, I’m sorry but there’s no good news for you. I’m not just referring to OneNote there. There’s just no good news for you generally.

Sadly for many owners of Samsung handsets, the pre-NoDo update didn’t work, and a small number of phones were even “bricked” by the update (the “fix” being to go back to the shop and swap it for a working handset). Fortunately I didn’t get stung by this – I’d actually attempted the update before reading that it may kill my phone, but having attempted it on my netbook, I didn’t have enough disk space available to do it.

I am one of a number of Samsung owners (I have an Omnia 7, but the Focus is also affected), who is experiencing a problem installing the updated pre-update update that updates the updating. Specifically, the process times out and offers up error code 800705B4. Microsoft has [sarcasm]provided a solution[/sarcasm] to this issue on the Microsoft Answers site – “temporarily delete media items from your phone and try the update again”.

This fits in with advice on the Windows Phone Help and hot-to pages about updating, which is linked from the Zune client when the error appears where it says that “Windows Phone Update requires that there is some extra space on your phone while it’s being updated.” Sadly neither that page, nor the “answer” on Microsoft Answers says how much space this specific update needs. You’d think they’d be able to know that fairly easily.

When I first received error 800705B4 I only had about 400Mb free on the phone, so I followed the advice and first removed all of my music from the phone. This left a whole gigabyte free, but the update failed again. I then removed some videos, taking the free space up to 1.3Gb. Failure again. Removal of pictures and podcasts took me up to 1.7Gb free – still no joy. Next I’m going to have to start on app removal.

Looking at some of the posts on Microsoft Answers, people have started out with as much as 3Gb free and removed content to free up over 5Gb in total, but they’re still getting 800705B4! I would love to see Microsoft telling us how much space it needs, or some evidence that 1.7Gb or even 5Gb is not enough! As it stands, their “answer” – that the update needs more free space is at best a fluke.

I can understand that the phone needs some space free to be able to complete the update, but surely it doesn’t need several gigabytes. If that was the case, then this problem certainly wouldn’t be specific to Samsung phones! Clearly something is still very broken with this update on certain Samsung firmware versions.

I’m starting to think that I may need to do a factory reset on my phone in order to get the update on. It wouldn’t take me long to get back up and running with most apps (although reinstalling them all will be a pain), and I can re-sync my media. The main problem is that Windows Phone 7 has been positioned as the Xbox Live phone and anyone who has to reset the device will lose any progress that they’ve made in any games because there’s no way to backup or restore application data.

As an early adopter, I expect some pain with a new technology, but this is getting a bit pathetic. I’m nearly mad enough about it to create a Facebook group!

In Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the Mobile World Congress yesterday, Microsoft outlined what’s coming to Windows Phone 7 in updates for the remainder of 2011. There’s some good stuff there: copy and paste will come along with some performance improvements in the first half of March, followed later in the year by some 3rd party multi-tasking, Twitter integration in the People Hub, enhanced support for SkyDrive in Office, and a mobile version of IE9, supporting HTML5 and utilising hardware accelleration via the GPU. It all sounds very positive, but what is still missing?

In fairness, they did say that this isn’t an exhaustive list of what they’re adding, so here are the slighlty less high-profile things that I’m hoping get added to the list:

More options to organise the full app list (alphabetical doesn’t scale well)

A remote desktop client

Mass storage functionality (to allow phone to be used as a USB drive)

Custom ringtones

Custom accent colours

Allow developers to “lock” capacitive buttons (it’s too easy to hit the Bing button when playing some games)

Remove/increase the cap on the number of apps that can get push notifications

Relaxed restrictions on use of low level APIs for key developer partners

It may be that some of those things are in the updates, but I’m going to bet that I’m still hoping for some of them to appear into 2012.

Of course it’s not clear yet quite how good some of the things that have already been annouced are going to be. I’m especially thinking about the multi-tasking and the SkyDrive support in Office – I’ll stick my neck on the block and say I’m expecting they’ll both have annoying limitations. Still, this is a new operating system and it’s at least moving in the right direction.

While I’m writing about what’s missing, there are some apps that I would especially like to see on the platform from 3rd parties. Hopefully they’ll be with us by the end of 2011 too:

Audible

Skype

TripIt

Gowalla

TweetDeck

BBC iPlayer

Flash (although I nearly left it off – it depends how quickly sites move to HTML5)

What have I missed? If there’s some feature or app that you are desperate to have on Windows Phone 7, let me know in the comments…

Over the last day or so, lots of blogs covering Windows Phone 7 and other mobile devices/gadgets, including big-hitters like Engadget, Boy Genius Report, Wired and Pocket-Lint have been reporting Last.fm’s announcement that they’re bringing free streaming to an end on all platforms other than the web and Windows desktop client, with the exception on Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7.

That seems to be diametrically opposed to the email message that Last.fm sent direct to me and other users of their WP7 app, which was:

From February 15 you will need to be a subscriber to listen to Last.fm Radio stations on devices, including your Windows Phone 7 app.

I tried to work out what was going on here, and the best that I can see is that the email message was wrong (which is odd).

…they are free-to-their users specifically because MS has subsidised the radio experience. This is no different than a mobile carrier choosing to subsidise an experience for their customers too. Xbox Live customers are paying for a great set of gaming experiences and Last.fm was a great fit for them. We see the Kinect Last.fm experience as an excellent one. And it is also ad-supported.

So that clears it up then. Microsoft clearly has that deal in place for the remainder of the year; whether it continues beyond that will remain to be seen, although since Last.fm is built in to the Xbox360 dashboard, I don’t expect they’ll want that to be an inconsistent experience going forward (unless they decide they want to have Xbox owners getting their music via Zune Pass in future).

For their part, Last.fm must have thought that I was in Germany, or at least somewhere outside the UK/US. Me and a number of other WP7 users who also posted in the comments on multiple blogs that they received the same message. In fairness, I have since checked, and although I had the correct timezone set and a .uk email address, my profile didn’t have my country saved. I’ve now updated it, so hopefully they’ll know that I can carry on listening on WP7 without subscribing.

Windows Phone 7 has native support for audio and video podcasts, and frankly it would totally remove the need for 3rd party podcast client apps if it didn’t require new episodes to be downloaded via the Zune software on a PC and synched to the phone. Microsoft know that people want to be able to access podcasts over the air (it has been mentioned on the Windows Phone podcast that they are looking at it as a possible future development), but until they do something about it, there is a market for app developers to do something to alleviate the frustrations of avid podcast consumers.

These are three such examples of podcast apps. I’ve used all of them for enough time to be able to share my opinions of them. One slight disclaimer: if you’re reading this very long after I’ve written it, it’s entirely likely that the applications will have been updated and the functionality changed.

This was the first general podcast streaming app that I found on WP7 and it’s not terrible considering it’s a free app, but it’s not wonderful either.

It certainly looks quite nice and it has some positive features like the ability to save favourite podcasts from their directory, a recently played list and a featured podcast, helping you discover new shows. Sadly that’s where the good news ends.

The included podcast directory isn’t comprehensive – there were some shows that I searched for that just weren’t present and there’s no way to add an RSS feed for a show they don’t list. I couldn’t find a way to provide feedback to request additions to the directory either; searching the web didn’t find me a website for the app or developer (admittedly I didn’t search too hard, but I shouldn’t have had to). Of the podcasts that are in the directory, some of the descriptions are out of date, and some aren’t in a format that PODCASTS! supports, so can’t be played. Add to that a lack of decent playback controls (no fast forward or rewind) and no bookmarking of your playback position when you have to leave the app, and really it’s a good job that this is a free app.

Although this app isn’t free, it offers significant advantages over PODCASTS! which led me to pay the money and use this as a replacement.

A lot of the things that are missing from PODCASTS! are present in Podceiver. You can fast forward and rewind by swiping left or right, and when you pause it remembers your position in the podcast and even integrates with the Music & Videos hub, so you can jump right back to the same place from there (just like you can with Zune content and YouTube). The directory in Podceiver had all of the podcasts that I found missing from PODCASTS! and allows you to add an RSS feed for any that aren’t in there. It also refines your directory search as you type, which is helpful. While PODCASTS! features a single podcast, Podceiver has a list of highlighted podcasts, so it’s even better for discovery.

Nothing is perfect, however, and I have experienced a couple of instances when the phone became totally unresponsive during playback. I’ve been using the app enough to be able to say that this is very rare, and it hasn’t happened enough for me to even tell if there was some kind of pattern of behaviour on my part that caused it. While the playback controls are workable, it would be nice to have fine scrubbing control. On the subject of the player aspect of the app, it doesn’t have a horizontal display mode for audio content (the screen just goes black when you turn it), and when vertical it doesn’t make great use of the screen real estate for audio (it could display the episode notes in the space reserved for video).

It would be great to be able to cache episodes while on wifi, but again this app just does streaming – more on that later. It would also be nice to have a recently player list in the app, since items may disappear from the History in the Music & Videos hub quickly if you’re consuming media in other ways on the device. I’m really nit-picking here, but it would be nice to be able to re-order your favourites, and I know that some people will be upset that there are still ads present in the paid version (although it doesn’t bother me personally).

Something that does stick in the throat a bit is that this app suffers from Microsoft’s dodgy practice of making up exchange rates for pricing outside the USA. $1 does not, and should not equate to £1. That said, I think that the £1.99 I paid for Podceiver is perfectly reasonable, but if you want to try it out without paying that, there is a free trial that is only limited in the number of podcasts you can save as favourites (3). For the foreseeable future, this app is pinned to my home screen.

There are a few apps that just support specific podcasts; they’re all a bit too niche to bother mentioning here, with the exception of Dmitry Lyalin’s app for Leo Laporte’s TWiT Network. If you’re into tech and podcasts then there’s little chance you haven’t heard of This Week In Tech or one of the other shows under the TWiT banner (Windows Weekly and Tech News Today are the other shows that I keep up with most of the time).

The TWiT app was the first app I saw (from anyone other than a big player like YouTube) that featured really nice integration into the Music & Videos hub. In fact I still think that this app does a better job of that than Podceiver because it handily overlays the episode number on the thumbnail in the recently played History. The app also has a live tile which shows the two most recently released shows on the network.

There are a couple of things that this app does in terms of playback that are better than the others too. There’s a button to skip back 30 seconds, which I’ve found very useful. For those times when you’re distracted by the phone ringing, or when you just want to check if you heard what you think you heard, this is a great feature that I think should be present on all podcast and audiobook players. Add to that the fact that the timeline doubles as a scrubbing control and I think this is as good a 3rd party media player as you’ll find on WP7 today. I’d love to be able to use it for shows outside of the TWiT network (and I’ve already said as much to Dmitry in an email).

Unfortunately none of these applications have playback controls as good as the built-in Zune podcast setup, but that fails to meet all the requirements as a mobile podcast client because of this annoying need to sync with the Zune desktop software. This is a smartphone, for goodness sake – it shouldn’t need to talk to a computer to be able to download a media file from a feed, and don’t get me started on the lack of international access to the Zune podcast directory!

Sadly it appears that limitations placed on developers for Windows Phone 7 mean that we aren’t going to get better than streaming for podcasts for now (although it’s rumoured that there may be better API support as early as February which would allow applications to save content locally). Ideally I’d like to see Microsoft make over-the-air support for podcasts native to the OS, but I’m not holding my breath.

The other limitation of the platform as it stands today is that you can only stream podcasts while the app is running in the foreground (with the caveat that they will continue playing behind the lock screen). Just as people cried out for 3rd party background apps on the iPhone for things like Pandora, it’s also desperately needed here. At the moment you could argue that what these apps do isn’t a whole lot better than opening a podcast’s website in the browser and launching an episode from there (which is what I was doing with ESPN Radio’s Scott Van Pelt Show, which wasn’t in the directory in PODCASTS!, but is present in Podceiver).

For now it seems that a podcast solution as neatly integrated and truly portable as Google’s Listen app on Android (which cleverly uses Google Reader as it’s back end database for feeds and tracking which episodes have been played), is a long way away.

p.s. When I wrote this, there was another dedicated podcast app in the marketplace called PodCaster which I ignored based on the reviews in the Marketplace. Some feed reader apps also claim to work as podcast clients, but I think that it’s sensible to keep your podcasts and other RSS feeds separate, not least because it would sometimes be nice to be able to listen and read at the same time, so you don’t want to tie the app up with one or the other. I don’t want to wrap this up without mentioning the NPR Listener app. It may be pretty basic, but it is a quick route to some excellent NPR audio content.

I don’t own Amazon’s best selling Kindle device (although I’d be happy to own one), but I do have the Kindle app on Windows, Android and Windows Phone 7. I’ve downloaded a handful of free titles of classic literature and a couple of full prices ebooks.

Having just installed the newly released app on Windows Phone 7* today, I had another look at the Kindle Store on Amazon.co.uk and was glad that I did because they’re currently running a promotion with a selection of Kindle editions for only a pound each. I picked up five.

The promotion only runs until the 6th January, so if you want to pick up a bargain or two, act now. Remember you don’t need a Kindle device to be able to read Kindle books – most decent smartphones, or even just a PC would do the job.

One of the great draws of Windows Phone 7 for me, and the many folks who have embedded all of their thoughts, memories, meeting notes and other titbits of information in OneNote, is the fact that OneNote Mobile can sync with notebooks on SkyDrive or SharePoint. To be honest, there was a distinct shortage of information about what the exact capabilities of OneNote on Windows Phone 7 were ahead of launch, but I was hoping that Microsoft had done the right thing. Initially I wasn’t sure that they had…

In order to get you started, OneNote Mobile will create a new notebook called “Personal (Web)”, which it will sync to a folder called My Documents on SkyDrive. It took me a short while to realise where it had put it because up to that point all of my OneNote notebooks had been in Documents and I don’t believe I had a My Documents folder. In fact, I’m pretty certain that when the Office Web Apps were released, the only place you could create OneNote notebooks was in the Documents folder (that’s no longer the case).

If this is your first time using OneNote, then you may want to just get started using that Personal (Web) notebook, but for those of us who are already invested in OneNote on the desktop and on SkyDrive, the next step to open your existing notebooks isn’t very clear. You may guess that moving them into this My Documents folder on SkyDrive would allow the phone to see them – that’s logical right? It seems to be where the phone likes to sync OneNote to. Nope.

You might think that the Windows Phone Help and How-To site would tell you what to do, say in the Use Microsoft OneNote Mobile topic. There’s a section in that document entitled “To open a OneNote notebook that’s on Windows Live SkyDrive”. Surely that tells you how to open your pre-existing notebooks in OneNote Mobile? Nah.

What you have to do is visit office.live.com in Internet Explorer on the phone, browse to your notebook and hit the icon. This will open it in OneNote Mobile and it will automatically start to sync with the phone. Repeat for each notebook. Easy when you know how, right?

Well that’s not the whole story – I explained how that worked to another Windows Phone 7 user and it didn’t work. It actually opened the notebook in the OneNote Web App. It turns out that’s because he’d set IE on his phone to open the desktop versions of sites rather than the mobile version. Changing the IE settings back to mobile enabled him to open and sync his notebooks.

I’m sure that there are some people who will say “well of course that’s how it works – that’s perfectly intuitive”, but it wasn’t initially obvious to at least two people and I’m sure we aren’t alone. As far as I’m concerned it’s fine that it works like this, but there could be a bit more clarity – this is a unique selling point of Windows Phone 7, so I don’t think that having some easy-to-find documentation of this feature would be too much to ask.

Incidentally, this does let you sync notebooks that have been shared with you by other users, which is good. They’re listed below your own folders and files in the mobile view of office.live.com on your phone’s browser.

One of the things that OneNote Mobile can’t currently do is sync password protected sections of your notebooks. This is a shame, but I can see why other things would’ve been ahead in the queue for the version 1 feature set. I expect this will come in a future update.

This week Apple CEO, Steve Jobs – you know, the guy famous for sending brand new iPods to the rescued Chilean miners – took advantage of having an audience for their quarterly earnings call to have a good dig at Google and their Android OS. I’ve been an Android user in a love/hate relationship with Android for a while, but I’ve also had plenty experience with iOS and I’ve been keeping a very close eye on the development of Windows Phone 7. I’ve been meaning to do an opinion piece for a while on the state of the mobile market, and a lot of it can be fairly well summed up in terms of how much I agree/disagree with what Steve said, so here’s a transcript of some of his tirade along with my commentary and further comments…

“Google loves to characterize Android as open, and iOS and iPhone as closed. We find this a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches. The first thing most of us think about when we hear the word “open” is Windows which is available on a variety of devices. Unlike Windows, however, where most pc’s have the same user interface and run the same app, Android is very fragmented. Many Android OEMs, including the two largest, HTC and Motorola install proprietary user interfaces to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience. The users will have to figure it all out. Compare this with iPhone, where every handset works the same.”

I didn’t really want to start this by going off on a tangent, but I do wonder which “most of us” think of Windows as open? It’s not the people who call Android open in the sense of “open source”. In fact if Steve thinks that people are referring to Android and iOS as open and closed in some other sense, then I think he’s missed the point. Unless of course we’re talking about open and closed in terms of getting apps on the platform, but that would be totally out of context.

He also talks about Windows being open in terms of being able to run the same app across PCs, yet he then goes on to talk about OEM custom skins on top of Android, which don’t affect whether apps work or not; rather how you launch them. So basically that whole paragraph is an attempt to spread FUD.

“Twitter client, Twitter Deck [actually Tweetdeck], recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers with a daunting challenge. Many Android apps work only on selected Android handsets running selected Android versions. And this is for handsets that have been shipped less than 12 months ago. Compare this with iPhone, where there are two versions of the software, the current and the most recent predecessor to test against.”

This is where I agree that Android fragmentation is an issue. Both of the Android handsets that I’ve used to date have had delays in getting upgrades to newer versions of the operating system because the OEM has been trying to make all their extra “value-add” crap work. I definitely know this to be true of my Dell Streak because a single amateur developer who lives 20 minutes down the road from me has managed to get a stock version of Froyo (Android 2.2) working on he device, while the might of Dell is still targeting a release sometime before the end of the year, having already screwed up an update to 2.1 that was semi-released and then scrapped.

As I write this, the Android ecosystem is populated by large numbers of devices running versions 1.6, 2.1 and 2.1 of the OS, with handfuls of other versions still kicking about as well. That can’t be helpful to developers, and the variety of hardware, even if it’s just a different screen resolution, has got to cause a lot of headaches.

Indeed the Android version of Tweetdeck (which is fully wonderful, by the way, and may be subject of another post here very shortly because I’m so impressed with it) does work fine on my Streak, provided I don’t want to use any of the homescreen widgets, which are “optimized for Android 2.1+”. The message goes on to suggest that you upgrade to a newer version, which would be good advice if it were possible.

“In addition to Google’s own app marketplace, Amazon, Horizon and Vodafone have all announced that they are creating their own app stores for Android. So there will be at least four app stores on Android, which customers must search among to find the app they want and developers will need to work with to distribute their apps and get paid. This is going to be a mess for both users and developers. Contrast this with Apple’s integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone. Apple’s App Store has over three times as many apps as Google’s marketplace and offers developers’ one-stop shopping to get their apps to market easily and to get paid swiftly.”

Ok, so everyone and his wife are going to be running their own app marketplace. I’m not sure that I agree with His Steveness that it’s better for customers to only have one place to go. I don’t think it’s necessarily better for developers too. It’s undoubtedly better for Apple, but that’s not the same thing.

Part of the reason that the smartphone market is so exciting right now is that there is genuine competition. It’s not good enough to sit on a successful platform anymore, because as Microsoft found out with Windows Mobile, you’ll soon become irrelevant. I’m not suggesting that competition in app marketplaces will necessarily drive innovation as much as it does in mobile hardware and software – a shopping process can only be refined to a certain point – but what it can do is drive down the price that the consumer pays, and drive up the percentage that the developer receives. I think that kind of competition would be great; I’m guessing Steve, less so.

People are used to shopping around, and on Android, where the app Market app has only just improved beyond its terrible beginnings, 3rd parties have filled the gap and spread the word about the apps. Let’s face it, I don’t imagine that music can only be successful if it’s “featured” in iTunes, and I don’t believe that being “featured” guarantees success, so there will always be room and a requirement to have something beyond that single marketplace.

Personally, if I could buy everything from Amazon, I would. But that’s just me.

“Even if Google were right, and the real issue is closed versus open, it is worthwhile to remember that open systems don’t always win. Take Microsoft’s PlaysForSure music strategy, which use the PC model, which Android uses as well, of separating the software components from the hardware components. Even Microsoft finally abandoned this open strategy in favor of copying Apple’s integrated approach with their Zune Player, unfortunately leaving their OEMs empty-handed in the process. Google flirted with this integrated approach with their Nexus One phone.”

Open systems don’t always win. Closed systems don’t always win either. Best systems don’t always win. Nor do cheapest systems always win. I don’t really know what Steve was trying to say there, unless he just saw a window of opportunity to have a dig at Microsoft too.

“In reality, we think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is, what’s best for the customer, fragmented versus integrated. We think Android is very, very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day. And as you know, Apple’s provides with the integrated model so that the user isn’t forced to be the systems integrator.”

I would say that there are pros and cons to both approaches. People who want someone to hold their hand are probably better off with iOS. Android offers more rope with which people may be able to hang themselves. The fact of the matter though is that a lot of the iPhone’s biggest fans, especially the tech-savvy ones, are jailbreaking their devices to get more functionality. One of the first things that they do in fact is install another marketplace (so stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Steve!).

Windows Phone 7 is taking a more Apple-like approach (although it looks to be positioning itself somewhere between Android and iOS is a number of ways). Microsoft are restricting what developers can do with the platform in order to ensure a good experience for the user, but time and time again I see developers screaming that they don’t want to be restricted to the managed code environment that is available to write software to the device. None of the approaches keep everybody happy.

“We see tremendous value in having Apple rather than our users’ be the systems integrator. We think this is a huge strength of our approach compared to Google’s. When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe Integrated will triumph Fragmented every time. And we also think our developers can be more innovative if they can target a singular platform rather than a hundred variants. They can put their time into innovative new features rather than testing on hundreds of different handsets.”

Indeed. This is why I’m beginning to doubt how successful Android will ultimately be as a platform for apps, having previously thought that developers would end up choosing to write code for Android first since it will most likely have the biggest install-base. I don’t doubt that there will be more Android devices than any other mobile OS in the next 5 years, but in terms of app development, it’s not like writing for a single target.

Mind you, “singular platform” is a bit rich coming from Apple, who already have two screen resolutions on iPhones as well as the iPad which benefits from specifically targeted applications. If at some point they start having iOS apps on the Apple TV then it might not be as diverse as Android, but it’s hardly singular.

When the launch devices were announced for Windows Phone 7 I was personally a bit disappointed because they were largely all the same, and basically lacking a bit in wow-factor. It’s clear that there’s essentially a reference platform for developers to target and the device manufacturers don’t have much flexibility to delight. That’s fine, because I think the OS will be good enough, but since I wasn’t expecting it, it was a touch disappointing. (I’m still quite excited about Windows Phone 7 – more on that later.)

“So we are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed. And we are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as open.”

My biggest problem with the integrated approach that Apple takes, and I expect I may have some similar issues with Windows Phone 7, is that the devices are designed to be a companion piece to the computer. Or to put it another way, they aren’t fully functional without a computer. One of the good things I can say about Android is that I’ve never needed to hook it up to a PC. If it wasn’t for the fact that I sometimes transfer big files to it over USB (rather than using a separate flash drive, then I could’ve survived with only ever plugging it in to a wall socket to charge.

I know that could be considered petty, but let me put this another way – if the device is so damn smart, why the hell does it need to be hooked up to a more powerful computer for anything? A computer that needs some specific software to be installed at that. These devices are computers, and they talk quite happily to the cloud by themselves. I’ve had somebody argue to me that you don’t want to be downloading big media files straight to the phone. Over 3G, you’re right, but you can’t tell me that downloading something on a mobile device over wifi is worse than downloading it to a PC and then transferring it to the phone over USB – are you nuts?!

Changing tack, I’m very pleased to see Microsoft re-entering this fray with the availability of Windows Phone 7 just two days away here in the UK. Well it’s two days if you listen to Microsoft – people working for the mobile networks don’t seem to know. One of the reasons that the iPhone isn’t for me is that I like my device to have glanceable data, and the live tiles on Windows Phone 7 looks like it’ll suit me pretty well. There’s also the Xbox Live integration, which I’m very much looking forward to because I like that service a lot – there’s a healthy competition going on between a bunch of my friends for the highest gamerscore (or maybe that’s an unhealthy competition). I also like the Microsoft are retaining control over the updates for Windows Phone 7, and they’re already teasing the first update early in 2011. If the device makers had a free reign to do what they want with the platform, then that wouldn’t be possible, so being tied down to this extent is a good thing in my view.

If it sounds like I’m planning to jump ship from Android to Windows Mobile 7, that’s not exactly true. I got the Dell Streak with a view to keeping it as an Android tablet even if/when I got a WP7 device, so I’ll continue to use both platforms. I guess that puts me well outside of the target market for Steve’s singular platform. That doesn’t mean I hate it. It benefits all of us if all of these platforms are good.